Dance Music Genres Safe as Fuck Watched Die in Real Time (Part 1)

In the interest of public education, Safe as Fuck has assembled a brief guide to several important dance music genres that shaped the modern festival landscape, primarily by proving that just because something is loud doesn’t mean it’s good.

Below are a few of the highlights.

Moombahton

Moombahton arrived in the early 2010s with the promise of merging reggaeton rhythms with Dutch house energy. The result was a genre that sounded like a laptop trying to play two unsynced YouTube tabs at the same time.

Many DJs embraced Moombahton because it offered something new.

Today the genre survives mostly in old festival folders labeled “2012 Bangers (Do Not Open).” And people that go to kits beach; yes, you will 100% hear it there for some reason.

Safe as Fuck would also like to recognize a historic moment in comedy logistics involving one of its founding members.

At the peak of Moombahton, sometime around 2012, said individual found himself in a basement in Kelowna listening to a young Semite passionately explain that Moombahton was

“The future of dance music.”

Rather than argue, he calmly set up a joke, planting the premise and waiting patiently.

4 years later, when the genre had quietly evaporated from polite conversation, he ran into the same guy again. Well, actually we brought him back to the warehouse we had lived above at the time from the UBCO campus

Without missing a beat, he delivered the punchline.

“Hey, so MooomBathon didn’t really take - off in the end did it!”

Witnesses confirm the room went silent for a moment before everyone realized they had just watched a Moombahton joke with a four-year setup.

Historians now consider it the longest successful Moombahton-related payoff in recorded history.

The young semite, embarrassed at his now ill - fated moombathon trajectory was shattered.

Tropical House

Tropical House was invented so people who hate house music could finally enjoy it.

Featuring gentle marimbas, ukulele sounds, and melodies designed to offend absolutely no one, Tropical House quickly became the soundtrack of beach bars, travel vlogs, and clothing stores that sell $90 linen shirts.

Critics have described the genre as:

“House music if it had to apologize before playing.”

The style is widely associated with Kygo, who proved that if you remove enough drums, bass, and personality from dance music, you can finally achieve the perfect sound for waiting in line at an airport smoothie bar.

Big Room House

Big Room House was created to solve a major problem in dance music:

What if subtlety was completely eliminated?

The formula was simple:

• One build-up

• One drop

• One melody that sounds like a stadium horn being slowly strangled

Festival crowds loved Big Room because the music was designed to be understood from 300 meters away by someone holding a $21 beer.

Producers loved it because it allowed them to write a full track using three sounds and a rubber chicken.

Whatever Kygo Made

Technically this falls under Tropical House, but it deserves its own category because the industry spent nearly a decade pretending the difference mattered.

Music historians now classify the sound as “Rugrat Pop.”

Key characteristics include:

• Pianos that sound like they’re apologizing

• Drops that refuse to drop

• Every track sounds like the intro from the Nickelodeon kids show “Rugrats”

• Big with peedos

Tech House

Tech House is what happens when techno and house get together and decide neither of them should try very hard.

The genre is built on a revolutionary idea:

take a drum loop, add a bassline, and then refuse to introduce any new information for seven minutes.

Tech House DJs often describe the music as “groove-focused.”

Which is accurate.

Because once you remove melody, harmony, structure, and personality…

the groove is all that’s left.

Final Thoughts

Despite everything written above, these genres remain fairly popular, proving once again that in dance music, confidence travels much farther than taste.

Safe as Fuck would like to thank the global festival circuit for continuing to give these sounds a platform, allowing the rest of us to experience the rare joy of hearing the exact same drop at six different stages simultaneously.